Gujarat CM wants the rich to adopt highly malnourished kids

In a bid to make Gujarat a malnutrition free state, Chief Minister Anandiben Patel today made an appeal to prominent people to adopt highly malnourished children from Anganwadis

Gandhinagar: In a bid to make Gujarat a malnutrition free state, Chief Minister Anandiben Patel today made an appeal to prominent people to adopt highly malnourished children from Anganwadis.

"We have recently conducted work of screening of the children, aged between 0 to 8 years, in Anganwadis across the state. We found that around two to five children in each Anganwadis were highly malnourished. Let us adopt these malnourished children," Patel said at an event here.

"People have to take responsibility of such kids in your surrounding. Though the state government has been taking all the responsibilities of all such kids, you just have to bring them with their mothers to nearest government hospital where they are treated for around 21 days," Patel added.

Giving example of staff of forest department in Navsari district, Patel said they adopted 156 malnourished children and 145 out of those kids have now become healthy. She was speaking after felicitating local bodies for their contribution in cleanliness mission to mark Prime Minister Narendra Modi's birthday.

The Chief Minister also felicitated Sarpanch of 11 villages, three municipalities and two municipal corporations who have achieved 100 per cent success in building personal toilets. According to her, around 3,800 villages of Gujarat have achieved 100 per cent target of making toilets where open defecation has ended.

She made an appeal to make attempts to make toilets in house of each and every village of Gujarat by 2017. Patel lauded the efforts made by Modi, a former Gujarat CM, to ensure a cleaner and healthier society while citing the letter's 'Swacch Bharat Abhiyan' initiative.

"Narendrabhai Modi is the first prime minister of the country who has concerns of cleanliness, hygiene, sanitation facilities. He has concerns for poor people and farmers of the country, no earlier prime minister had such concerns," she said.

"Narendrabhai held broom to clean the roads and for the purpose of cleanliness to give a clean India under Swachh Bharat Mission, such initiatives were never taken in the past," she added. "No other prime ministers of the country had taken such an initiative in the past.

Morarjibhai Desai had tried to do something but there were people who pulled his legs," the Chief Minister said. Minister of State for Health and Urban Development, Shankar Chaudhari said in the last one year, 70 per cent toilets of the country's urban area have only been built in Gujarat, while rest of the 30 per cent were made in other states.

"3,09,575 toilets were made in urban area of Gujarat, which comprised 70 per cent of the entire country, as around 4,47,379 toilets were made in other states of the country," he said.